Kindle-like app

Unity Engine
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1

Hi,

I’m wondering is there a solution to develop a kindle-like reader app? Including importing epub books, text selection, annotation, etc.

Thanks for your help!

2

I have a serious doubt someone would recreate epub parsing and rendering in Unity, mostly because the latest standards are heavily HTML5-oriented.

Unity is far away from being an ideal text processor and you’d have to build a DOM parser and an internet browser, practically, supporting content structures and layouts and text flow and whatnot. Otherwise it’s not an epub anymore.

But I could be wrong, I don’t know if there is perhaps a great demand for some reason or if it could be simplified. A real-time rendering engine should be an overkill for such an application.

Now I wish books were done with animated illustrations and interactive storytelling. Oh wait.

1 Like
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Nothing I’m aware of that does precisely that. In line with @orionsyndrome 's comment there is a browser asset available but it’s going to be as heavy as a normal browser plus the weight of Unity and it’s not a cheap either.

https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/40309

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4

Thanks for your help, @orionsyndrome and @Ryiah .

That’s what I thought. I found a UnityEPubReader On Github (buddingmonkey/UnityEPubReader: EPub reader for Unity3d (github.com)) but it’s built 8 years ago.

Is there a way to update a frame on-demand instead of updating 60 frames a second?

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You can reduce it but you can’t pause it, and there is a side effect to it. Input rate is tied to frame rate because it’s just before Update() that input is polled by Unity. So a single frame per second would mean a single poll too. Plus there’s no guarantee that you will get the refresh rate you want. Platforms can override it.

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The new InputSystem can be set to manual update mode, and you can disable Cameras and manually request renders, too. You could potentially also set up (platform specific) listeners for native device input so that you don’t need to trigger full Input System updates until you know there’s something to respond to.

I’ve never tried any of that, because Unity simply doesn’t strike me as a well suited tool for the type of app where you’d typically use such interaction models. By the time you’ve done all of that in any kind of polished manner I suspect that you may as well have spent the time learning something like Xamarin instead.

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You could try use physics fixed update and go into project settings physics and set auto simulate off and then call simulate from a script. I think it ticks by the update may be incorrect. But I am sure it does.

You can also have 60fps running constant but only call logic such as page turn when function is pressed. Dropping frames per second will give a bad user experience if dropping below 30.